Greenland's ice is melting at an alarming rate, researchers warn

Sally Carroll |Friday, December 07, 2018

Melting of Greenland’s ice is ‘off the charts,’ study shows

According to the study, the melting steadily and steadily until the mid-19th century, but in the 20-21 century the pace has accelerated. In the last 20 years, however, melt intensity has increased by up to 575 percent in comparison with the pre-industrial rates.

Published today in Nature, the research finds that rates of melting at Greenland's surface have skyrocketed in recent decades and are now far out of bounds of what was considered natural variability over the last few centuries.

'The melting and sea-level rise we've observed will be dwarfed by what may be expected in the future'. "As a result, Greenland melt is adding to sea level more than any time during the last three and a half centuries, if not thousands of years", Luke Trusel, a glaciologist at Rowan University's School of Earth & Environment and former postdoctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said in a statement. "We found a 50 percent increase in total ice sheet meltwater runoff versus the start of the industrial era, and a 30 percent increase since the 20th century alone".

Scientists have been observing a colossal ice sheet in Greenland shrink at an unprecedented rate due to global warming. The team was then able to use modern, precise measurements of melt and correlate those measurements with the pattern seen in the ice cores, which allowed them to estimate what melt at lower elevations across the island would have looked like in each year recorded in the high-elevation cores.

Kendrick Lamar Received The Most 2019 Grammy Nominations
Cardi B is also racking up the nominations with five nods, including the big Album of the Year award for Invasion of Privacy . The Carters did get nominations for Best Urban Contemporary Album, Best R&B Performance and Best Music Video .

Karnataka lake drained in fear of HIV virus
There is no other way. "We still have to drain water from 60% of the lake and need at least five days to empty it", he said. Afraid they would contract HIV/AIDS, villagers informed authorities they would not use it till fresh water was filled.

The report comes after naturalist Sir David Attenborough warned the collapse of civilisations and extinction of much of the natural world "is on the horizon" without urgent action to tackle climate change. Instead of escaping the ice sheet, the short-lived meltwater forms icy bands that stack up layers of densely packed ice over time. Ice core samples were brought back to the labs at the U.S. National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility in Denver, Colorado., WHOI in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Wheaton College in Norton, Mass, and the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada.

At lower elevations, meltwater simply runs off the ice sheet, but at higher elevations some percolates down through porous, compacted snow called firn before refreezing to form layers not unlike the growth layers found in trees. Dark bands running horizontally across the cores record the strength of the melting for a given year. Hence, the region could be the largest contributor to the rising sea level, more than any region across the globe.

"Even a very small change in temperature caused an exponential increase in melting in recent years", she said. Another noteworthy aspect of the findings is how little additional warming it now takes to cause huge spikes in ice sheet melting.

In the wake of October's dire report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that civilization has just more than a decade to stave off climate catastrophe, Thursday's report spells more bad news for the planet, especially the millions of people living near the world's oceans.

Wilder hoping for a rematch with Fury 'ASAP'
The two unbeaten heavyweights surprised everyone and became the water-cooler topic of Monday and beyond after fighting to a draw. This is a family. "It has really opened my eyes to a lot of things and I'm leaving as a better person.

MLB Rumors: Phillies trading for Jean Segura
Segura, 28-years old, hit.304 last season with an.755 OPS, knocking in 63 runs on 10 home runs, 29 doubles and 178 total hits. Crawford, the 13th pick in the 2013 Major League Baseball draft, played 49 games for the Phillies previous year .

3 astronauts blast off to International Space Station
The Soyuz rocket's journey to the International Space Station took approximately six hours, and it docked at 12:40 p.m. Cosmonaut Kononenko said on Sunday, Dec. 2, during a press conference, that he "absolutely" trusts the flight plan.

Silly Seal Gets An Eel Stuck In His Nose
They also suggested that the seals could have swallowed the eels and regurgitated it, causing the eels to come out the wrong way. Researchers recorded a record number of seal pups born on the main Hawaiian islands this year.

Merkel loyalist wins German party leadership battle
Sometimes dubbed "mini Merkel", Kramp-Karrenbauer is admired by the CDU upper echelons for her appeal across the party. The victor will likely lead the CDU in the next federal election due by October 2021.

BT bans Huawei from 5G core
However, BT's spokesperson insists the moves to exclude Huawei are not a knee-jerk reaction to the latest developments. A spokesman said: " Huawei has been working with BT for nearly 15 years".